Hank was part of that generation. When he was younger he had become obsessed with an old Vietnam War movie, 10 Clicks from Laconia, about a group of American soldiers who hold back a Chinese tank invasion with a wall of fire made from a single can of fuel. Being a preppy rich kid, Hank was well educated. But he also came from a long line of DIY Texas tinkerers. He bought himself one of the chemical plants that made napalm, along with most of the outstanding patents. He hired a couple of smart chemists to help him develop the crazy idea he had. And when they had a good beta version, he showed it to the Pentagon.

One of the generals in the original pitch meeting called it “the neutron bomb of napalm.” But it was better than that.

Titan Jelly® could burn the forest and leave the wood.

And when it was time to exterminate the green rebellion that had taken root in Central America, they made the decision to deploy Hank’s new product.

That was forty years ago. Only now did people really understand what the price had been. The razing of jungles the size of entire countries caused climate change that was already under way to accelerate and morph in ways none of the models anticipated. Across the hemisphere, fertile farm regions became deserts, glaciers melted, rivers dried or overflowed, wildfires raged, storms became more frequent and more intense, and coastal cities drowned.

In the United States, some of those climate-ravaged regions became the breeding grounds for unrest.

But it was only when the unrest had erupted into a full-blown rebellion that the federal forces deployed Titan Jelly domestically, to burn the rebels out. It was supposed to be a targeted application on a handful of encampments, but when the fires started they couldn’t be contained, and big swaths of old-growth forest in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia burned. And among the consequences was that the rivers that fed into New Orleans and DC were poisoned—in the case of New Orleans, adding to the poisons that had already been draining out of the heartland for decades.

Joyce was not the first to make the case that someone should pay for those damages. But she was the first to say the ones who should pay are the ones who really made money from it.

In a way, it was very similar to what he was trying to do with Slider.

In another, it was very, very different.

Slider was one dead kid who lost his parents. Joyce and Percy and their comrades were suing on behalf of forests. He wanted to ask how it was they got their client to sign up for their program, but he couldn’t afford to spend any more time in the cage.

31

Joyce left Donny at a big table with three of the researchers helping Percy prepare her case. Their names were Petra, Lupe, and Dan.